How a love of whodunit mysteries has paved the way for forensic entomology

This article was taken from the December 2013 issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional
content bysubscribing
online.

When Amoret Whitaker arrived at a crime scene in Cumbria where
teenager Shafilea Ahmed's body had been found, the first thing she
looked for was insects. She collected pupal cases, day-old maggots and adult
blowflies in a jar, and picked fly-eggs off the corpse. Her goal:
to determine how long the girl had been dead.

Whitaker, a PhD student at the Natural History Museum in
London, has investigated 30 cases with police departments
using forensic entomology: the study of insects on corpses. "As
soon as somebody dies, their body starts to give off odours, which
are attractive to insects like greenbottles and bluebottles," she
explains. "If the body is found and newly-hatched maggots are
feeding on it, we can work out how old the insects are, and
therefore how long the person has been dead."

Whitaker, 48, came
across forensic entomology when she spent three years at the
Natural History Museum writing The Handbook of British
Fleas. "The flies and fleas were kept together in the same
gallery and the other person on that floor was my current boss,
Martin Hall, who worked on blowflies in a forensic context," she
says.

A whodunit fan who grew up reading Sherlock Holmes, she asked Hall if she could work for him. "My
first case was Shafilea Ahmed, whose parents were convicted of her
murder," she says. After dating the maggots on her body and at the
crime scene, Whitaker testified at a coroner's court that the girl
had died as soon as she disappeared, which was six months before
her body was found. "The parents were saying maybe she ran off with
a boyfriend or a friend and hadn't died straightaway, so the
time of death was crucial to the investigation," explains
Whitaker.

She and her colleagues are working on questions such as how
temperature affects fly development on corpses, and how long insect
evidence lasts reliably at a crime scene -- a question that came up
while investigating the murder of 13-year-old Milly Dowler, two
years after her body was discovered. "My work is morbid but
fascinating," she says. "Quite often the case actually raises more
scientific questions, so it's a special case of science and society
benefiting each other."